The AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy maintains this blog to disseminate information relevant to astronomers who identify as women. If you have an idea for a blog post or topic, please submit to wia-blog at lists.aas.org.
The views expressed on this site are not necessarily the views of the CSWA, the AAS, its Board of Trustees, or its membership.

Wednesday, April 30, 2014

I was recently invited to speak at an event in celebration of Women's History Month, along with a number of other women in the area both from the University of Wyoming and the surrounding community. It was a wonderful event, where I got to meet a lot of amazing local women and hear about their varied experiences. In the five minutes I was allotted, I talked a bit about myself and reflected on some of the challenges I face being a woman in science. This is a synopsis of what I said, stated perhaps a bit more eloquently now that I've had a chance to review it in my mind.

I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Wyoming. I've been here at UW since 2011. And although I've spent most of my life on the East Coast, I've come to love the Mountain West and I now consider myself to be a Wyoming Woman.

Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Imagine a world were research
funding was dependent on diversity! If a science department had no tenured
women, for example, then (at least in this particular fantasy) it would not
qualify for $$ from NASA, NSF, DOD, NIH, etc. If a laboratory employed
no people of color, then it would have a lot of work to do before it could even
think about applying for grants. Proposals would be returned without review to
principle investigators from organizations where the gender and ethnic
breakdown of the scientific staff did not reflect that of the population at
large. Crazy, huh? It’s a pipedream, you say, a fantasy, a delusion, a hallucination.
This is just the kind of thing a person like me would dream about at night or fantasize
about in all my spare time.

But wait! Believe it or not, there
is an organization in Britain that is working to level the playing field for
women in the STEMM disciplines (includes medicine in addition to the US STEM
list). The organization is called Athena SWAN . The amazing thing about this
organization is that unless a university or department has at least a Silver
ranking with Athena SWAN, funding organizations such as the British National
Health Service will not consider the institutions eligible for research grants!

Monday, April 28, 2014

Today I'm proud to announce that my AAS 223 Hack Day project is finally finished! Our "paper" (really an informal report) on the study of gender in AAS talks has hit astro-ph: http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.3091

This all started about 6 months ago when I was attending a different astronomy conference. I observed that the gender ratio for speakers seemed well balanced, as did the audience. Both were perhaps 60%/40% (Men/Women). However, the questions mostly seemed to be asked by men!

So I decided to organize a volunteer effort to study this. We collected data using a simple web-form (that Morgan Fouesneau graciously helped me make), and asked conference attendees to record the gender of every speaker and every question asker for talks they attended.We got over 300 submissions! I was going to be happy with 100, and figured I'd have to beg a few friends to participate. This was enough data to make some interesting plots... and also just enough data to know that we need more data!Here are a few highlights from the study:

1. MEN ASK DISPROPORTIONALLY MORE QUESTIONS THAN WOMEN IN TALKS.

FS FQ = Female Speaker, Female Questions,

FS MQ = Female Speaker Male Questions, etc

We were very glad to see that the gender ratio of all the speakers matched that of the conference participants. This also closely matches the gender ratio of astronomers under the age of ~40 as reported in the AAS Demographics survey recently.

Below is our interview with an astronomer turned Education and Public Outreach Officer. If you have questions, suggestions, advice to share, etc. about this career path, please leave a comment below.

For access to all our Career Profile Project interviews, please visit http://aas.org/jobs/career-profiles. We plan to post a new career profile to this blog every first and third Thursday of the month.

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

I just read
a 2012 Physics Today article about statistics on women scientists that was
understandable and compelling.It was great to see their numbers and be able to interpret them myself.The PT
article is called "Women in Physics:A Tale of Limits" by Rachel Ivie and Casey Langer Tesfaye (Feb.
2012).In 2009 and 2010, the Working
Group on Women in Physics of the International Union of Pure and Applied
Physics did a large international survey to determine the status of women
physicists worldwide.They surveyed
15,000 women and men physicists from 130 countries, asking questions to reveal
where women may be limited in their careers.Results are
given related to career-advancing activities that respondents experience.Examples are invited speaker at
conferences, leader of a group, editor of a journal and serving on conference
organizing committees.They gave
the numbers and I couldn't resist doing my own analysis.Here is my summary plot of the ratio of
women to men experiencing different activities as a function of the importance
of the activity.

Monday, April 21, 2014

An article in The Atlantic by Kathy Kay and Claire Shipman is well worth reading and pondering. On average, women are less confident than men, with harmful consequences for equitable advancement based on ability. "Confidence, " says psychologist Richard Pette, "is the stuff that turns thoughts into action." A person with low confidence tends to try less hard, to give up more easily, to negotiate less successfully, and to face fewer challenges that lead to growth. Could it be that men's overconfidence is putting women at a disadvantage?

Below is our interview with an astronomer turned staff scientist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO). If you have questions, suggestions, advice to share, etc. about this career path, please leave a comment below.

For access to all our Career Profile Project interviews, please visit http://aas.org/jobs/career-profiles. We plan to post a new career profile to this blog every first and third Thursday of the month.

Monday, April 14, 2014

Today’s guest blogger is Katja Poppenhaeger. Katja is a
Sagan postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).
Her research interests are exoplanets and their host stars, with a focus on
stellar magnetic activity and its effects on exoplanetary atmospheres. She also
is the organizer of the CfA's Women In Science Chats, a series of informal
discussions where female CfA postdocs and graduate students can meet with
visiting scientists.

A few weeks ago my colleague, Mohaddesseh Azimlu, mentioned how great it would
be to have a group photo of all the female astronomers and astronomy students
at the CfA. She was about to leave for a new career opportunity in Canada, so
we hurried to invite everyone for a photo shot on a cold February day. We got
an overwhelmingly positive response from the astronomers: We had 55 people join
the picture, and 17 more who could not attend in person sent in photos of
themselves to be added to the picture. Here's the result:

Friday, April 11, 2014

We have another guest post today from Caitlin Casey, a McCue Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Irvine who studies galaxy formation and evolution, including discovering and characterizing diverse types of starburst galaxies and how they relate to more "normal" spiral galaxies in the early Universe. Caitlin recently cowrote, along with Kartik Sheth, a NatureJobs article entitled The Ethical Gray Zone, based on an extensive community poll on ethics and diversity. She is also involved in STEM outreach and mentoring within her department and throughout astronomy.

After reading this pretty excellent article onSlate about how to 'look the part' of computer genius (long story short, being an Asian male is pretty helpful), I thought a lot about how the notion of privilege affects STEM research. Privilege itself is a term that carries a lot of stigma and even vile hatred for some, as if there's an implied prejudice or blame that comes with it. Many folks aren't comfortable with the idea that they have special rights or advantages (or even immunities) based on their physical appearance or life choices, and that these advantages pervade all aspects of life: even, *gasp* their research and work environment.

Below is our interview with Andria Schwortz, an astronomer turned tenure track faculty at a Community College. If you have questions, suggestions, advice to share, etc. about this career path, please leave a comment below.

For access to all our Career Profile Project interviews, please visit http://aas.org/jobs/career-profiles. We plan to post a new career profile to this blog every first and third Thursday of the month.

Monday, April 7, 2014

The UK's House of Commons Science and Technology Committee recently released a set of recommendations for promoting "Women in Scientific Careers". The report includes numerous useful references to studies describing the range of obstacles to recruitment and retention, as well as useful references to studies providing remedies and solutions for these obstacles.

However, many found the report 'weak', particularly in terms of failing to address the structural changes needed in academia to tackle inequality. For example, women faculty at the University of Cambridge published a letter in the Times Higher Education calling specifically for changes in how academics are assessed so that women do not face disadvantages for taking on tasks in teaching, administration and public engagement, rather than research. The letter says that a broader set of metrics should be used to evaluate performance and determine promotion.

Below is our interview with Neil Gehrels, an astronomer turned Chief of NASA Goddard's Astroparticle Physics Laboratory. He loves his job, is very satisfied with his work-life balance, and finds his work environment to be very family friendly. If you have questions, suggestions, advice to share, etc. about this career path, please leave a comment below.

For access to all our Career Profile Project interviews, please visit http://aas.org/jobs/career-profiles. We plan to post a new career profile to this blog every first and third Thursday of the month.

Wednesday, April 2, 2014

The below is a guest post from Dr. Sarah Ballard. Dr. Ballard completed her PhD in Astronomy & Astrophysics at Harvard University in 2012 and is now a NASA Sagan fellow at the University of Washington. Follow her on twitter at: @hubbahubble

To work in astronomy is now to work in teams. A recent PNAS study reported that the average team size associated with a single publication grew from 1.5 in 1961-1965, to 6.7 in 2006-2010 (Milojević 2014). However, much of the dialog about the nature of intelligence is still focused upon single individuals. Though the conception of a person’s intelligence as a fixed quantity is fraught at best (see this summary by J. Johnson), it’s often the only way we conceive of intelligence at all. What is the nature of the intelligence of a group? What quantities are predictive of it, if any? It is now groups of individuals who publish new ideas in our field. To ask about group intelligence is now to ask: “How are units of knowledge produced?”